Please do not download at 00:00:00 regardless of what time zone you are in. This database is downloaded many tens of thousands of times / day and if everyone downloads at the same time, nobody gets anything. Choose an arbitrary time (especially the minutes.
Thank you! :).

To do an automated download with something like wget, use the following link format (some versions of
wget may require you add the http:// prefix):

Yes but only since April 2011. Before that we
never realized folk were interested in this information.
But now it makes sense to provide it. Thanks for those
who pointed this out. The historical data is here

Q. Is the IPV6 address space
supported?

Yes it is, both as a range as well as a CIDR
formatted file. They are included as two separate files
with slightly different formats to the original IPV4
database.

Q. I Cannot download the database from my current IP but I can download from other IP addresses. What's up?

We allow 100 "hit points" per IP address per day on a roll-over basis. 1 Lookup costs 1 + 1 point and 1 download is 25 + 1. In other words, you are allowed 3 downloads from the same IP address in any 24 hour period. Unfortunately we have recently had to introduce this safety measure as some "developers" insist on releasing buggy software, resulting in the equivalent of denial of service attacks on our servers.

If you are a developer using automated (cron) software to periodically download this database, please make sure you test your code before distributing it. There are several scripts out there that do not work, and attempt to automatically download our database many hundreds of times per minute. Often for days at a time. To make matters worse, some developers have released such faulty code to the general public as parts of other applications, further exacerbating the problem. Obviously, this is unacceptable to us and we now automate the blocking of IP addresses.

Please note that this is an automatic process and we cannot remove your IP from the blocked list manually. You will need to wait the prescribed time to download again.

UPDATE: We have now added additional code that will further penalize IP addresses based on a sliding scale for more than 1,000 hit points are accumulated in any one day.

Q. I found an IP you don't have in your database. Can I sent it to you?

Please don't! We cannot add or remove IPs from the database. The process we use is automated and the IPs in the database are as as we get them from the various registries around the world. If a registry does not list an IP the only way to get it in our database is for the registry to add it to their database. We can't do that.

Q Two records start with the same IP_from number. One is registered by ARIN, the other one by RIPE. First one is allocated to USA, the second to EU. This obviously is an error.

This is not an error. It is the way the IPs are delegated at the various registries. For example, you may get a large block (/8) from a large international company registered in the USA or Europe and sub-nets listed in other countries. ARIN may list ALL the IPs allocated to this organization while RIPE (or whatever) would list only the IPs relevant to use in that country.

Q. I looked up my IP and it said it was from one country but I am somewhere else. What gives?

We use the registry assignments provided by the registrars. However discrepancies creep in especially in cases of large multinational companies who have their base of operation on one country and satellite offices in other countries. Typically what happens is that a company based in say, the United States, also has a branch in Africa or Asia.

In many cases, when the company is assigned a new block of IP addresses these will reflect the correct country (Africa or Asia for example). However, sometimes the location of the parent company is used - USA for example. This leads to an anomaly, where looking up the IP you know to be in one country appears to be somewhere else.

This is especially true of companies like AOL, Verizon, Sprint, Telefonica and others who do not operate only in one country. We have found IPs for both AOL and Verizon for example which are outside the US but show as originating in the US which is obviously not correct.

Although this only represents a tiny fraction of a percent, this is something that should be kept in mind.

Q. You say there are over 3 billion IPs in the database. No way! There are less than 100,000

The IP numbers listed in the database are ranges not single numbers. Each line in the database represents a range of IPs numbers (known as a block) representing many hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousand IP numbers.

Q. What does the Country code EU (European Union) mean?

The IP to country information in the database is provided 'as is' from the various registry sources. In some cases a country is only given as 'EU' which means it can be anywhere within the European union.